Recent reviews by MatuX

oh very nice yes

is very good eh very good

is good, is good

z0mg dood, 'tis so gud

It's been two years and the game still offers uncompelling gameplay. The vastness of the milky way, great flight mechanics and immersive atmosphere can't make up for the absolutely amateur approximation to gameplay.

Let me describe my last 4 hours of gameplay:

Got a mission to destroy a bunch of drones at a planetary station.
I arrive, I attack the station (this sends it into defensive mode where drones come out to attack you), no drones are spawned. There's no indication of where should I find them.
I decide to fly around as there're random Points of Interests that spawn randomly on planets.
To find those, you gotta fly around until you spot a big blue circle, land, get your buggy out, start driving around.
Found nothing on the POIs where there should've been something.

(Much later I'll found out on the net there's a "trick" to find the POI by approaching them with your ship from a certain heading, at a specific angle, from a specific altitude. Basically, you circumvent the boring gameplay to get to the fun part)

This is already about 2 hours.

Finally found a POI, there's a bunch of buggies with a bounty on their heads driving around.
I decide to go and engage them, the one I pursue keeps getting farther away.
I get tired, I start pursuing the other buggy.
I engage it, it aggroes me, but doesn't even fire at me.
After about 10 minutes, I get it down to 29% armor, suddenly I can't damage it anymore.
After a minute firing at it, it disappears into thin air.

I go back to my ship and I keep looking for POIs.

Finally found a POI with drones.
I destroy all of them. At last I feel I'm doing some progress.
My kills are not counting towards the mission.
Seems like destroying them from your ship doesn't work IF it's a POI, so you must be in your buggy.

Why? Because inorganic gameplay restrictions is the best way to destroy the immersive atmosphere of the game. FDev likes that as inorganic mechanic restrictions is a very common gameplay pattern in E:D.

I keep looking for another POI. I find it. I get out on my buggy.
3 drones engage me, within 10 seconds, I'm destroyed by them.
I quickly hit to rejoin my ship to have some sweet revenge.
My ship magically appears hundreds of miles above surface in the same coordinates.
I go back to where the POI was, but since this MMO has no persistence, the POI has vanished.
I can't even vent out and get some revenge.
At this point, after literally 4 hours trying to do something, anything in-game, I quit to desktop.

Yes, this all happened in a span of 4 hours. I'm a patient man and I don't mind slow games.

---

I want to love this game so much. The atmosphere, visuals, audio and flight mechanics are so compelling. But at the same time, everything else is so badly designed, it feels like the military is conducting a social experiment to test the extent of human patience.

I reached my limit.

Given the popularity of the review, I wanted to correct a few mistakes and expand a bit:

There're two motivators in-game: money and exploring the unknown. The former is self-serving, you make money to get better ships and modules that *only* allows you to make more money. To paraphrase Fight Club's Tyler Durden: "We work jobs that don't matter to buy things we don't need".
The latter can be cool but extremely lacking: There's nothing to do out there. *Nothing.* No emerging quests, plots, mysteries, hidden knowledge, stuff to research, no progression (except rank and money), surveying is literally just about aiming towards a celestial body and wait till it gets automatically scanned.

Knowing if a celestial body is worth approaching to scan (some can be really far) is about “playing” a hidden weird mini-game that lives in the system view, so, you basically LISTEN TO AUDIO CUES, like, if it’s a water world you may hear bubbles, if it’s an earth-like planet you may hear birds chirping, or if it’s a rocky world, just wind.
This is not even explained in-game, you find about it on Reddit/Forums (see meta-gaming down there).
I honestly have no idea who thought this would be fun and not a hassle, and that it wouldn’t break immersion.

You do experience being in actual places in the Milky Way (amazing!), see some really cool vistas and some crazy systems. If you love astronomy like I do, lots of very interesting places exist in game. I love this side of the game and it’s my current motivator. I unfortunately can’t recommend based solely on this since I can get the same thing from Space Engine. There’s just not enough gameplay around exploration, the monetary reward is minimal and your personal progress is almost inexistent except for a text that changes (rank) the more money you make selling your survey data.

Other terrible things:
1. You can't survive without meta-gaming (look it up). Breaks immersion immensely for me, having to jump to Chrome to check vital game data the actual game doesn't provide you.
2. It's the first multiplayer sandbox that allows almost no emergent gameplay, how they managed to achieve this is amazing to me. Only emergent gameplay I've seen in TWO years: a player-run refuel 911 service (inaccessible through the game! see point 1.) and organization of expeditions into the vast unknown (this is actually really cool, but impossible to organize within the game).

I want so much to love this game, though. I can still dream they'll hire a talented game designer one day. Thanks for reading.

——

I’d like to expand even further on a few areas:

CQC/Arena, the game’s Deathmatch Mode, because if there’s one thing a slow-paced, contemplative highly atmospheric game can benefit from is a Doom-like Deathmatch mode. I can’t believe SCS Software didn’t add a Destruction Derby mode to Euro Truck Simulator. In any case, it can be fun but not as fun as any of the dozens of Swashbuckling Space games out there. So, what about rewards? None. It has no bearing on your in-game progression nor an impact on the game’s Universe. It’s so disconnected from the main game you access it from the game’s system main menu. Not as fun as actual Swashbuckling Space games, no tangible rewards, no motivation.

Then you have Powerplay which tries to be another motivator by letting you fight for political factions (cool!). The problem with this is that it's so disconnected from the game world that if you don't strictly participate, it might as well not be there. It has no impact on the game’s Universe. On top of that, you have little to no impact on what actually happens. So, you play something that doesn’t matter and you have very little impact on where it’s headed.

Finally, Community Goals. Every couple of weeks you get galaxy-wide goals to achieve certain things like repairing an important station on the far reaches of the galaxy, and helping establish a human presence on a remote area. And as usual, the premise is nothing short of amazing but the amateur execution kills it: These goals *can’t fail*, it doesn’t matter what players do, they can’t fail. Your actions don’t matter. You follow FDev’s script as an observer. So? What’s the point? Yep, you guessed: Money, so you can buy a better ship to make more money. We work inconsequential jobs to buy things we don’t need.

It’s hard for me to understand how such a great foundation, good and fun mechanics, one of the best game atmospheres ever conceived and an entire galaxy to exploit could produce such inane gameplay.

I love you, Elite. But I hate you.